in managed care has grown dramatically during the 1990s, as private and public purchasers of health care turn to managed care as a way of providing more costeffective delivery of health services. Managed care programs work toward these goals by changing how providers are paid, developing select provider networks, establishing protocols for appropriate care, and offering enrollees financial ince...

This paper evaluates the empirical relation between the level of "nancial intermediary development and (i) economic growth, (ii) total factor productivity growth, (iii) physical capital accumulation, and (iv) private savings rates. We use (a) a pure cross-country instrumental variable estimator to extract the exogenous component of "nancial intermediary development, and (b) a new panel techniqu...

This draft is meant to encourage discussion of a policy option. It may be cited or circulated without restriction. Executive Summary Successful health care reform requires effective cost control. Yet the cost control discussion to date has been dominated by proposals involving system reorganization which, however attractive in principle, have already been analyzed by the Congressional Budget Of...

Developments in risk-transfer instruments and risk management techniques in the last two decades have fundamentally changed how banks manage their assets and liabilities. In this document we show that, for all three sectors of German universal banks (private commercial banks, savings banks, and cooperative banks), asset-liability dependency declined over the period 1994-2007, the decline was st...

Savings decisions are observed at the household level, but little is understood about how such decisions are jointly made by the members of the household. This paper employs a new experimental design to examine two poorly understood factors in household spending and savings decisions: private information and communication between spouses. Married couples in the Philippines were given approximat...